Long Guns

Who owns the long guns? Mostly rural dwellers, farmers, and of course seasonal hunters. And then there are also sports aficionados, engaged with competitive gun sports. Yes, the criminal class own long guns, but they're usually the type forbidden entry into Canada, and they don't acquire them by legal means, so why would they be expected to register them?

There are people who have owned a rifle for as long as they can remember, and they've seldom used the rifle, but they keep it around, anyway. Those are the people, largely, who years ago when the long gun registry was created after the horror of the Montreal Ecole Polytechnique massacre, (launched by a sole psychopathic misogynist as a gut reaction to death taking the lives of vital young women) dutifully sent in their registration and fees.

Criminals generally use small arms, easily concealed handguns. And for these there is an underground industry which smuggles them into the country and makes them available at a price to anyone seeking anonymous ownership of a deadly weapon. Any guns purchased through legitimate sports shops must be registered; their ownership is known and traceable.

The long gun registry works for police just the way that HAZMAT registration works for fire fighters responding to an industrial blaze. They know, by viewing the assembled and stored documents within their territory where volatile chemicals are held in a sprawling industrial complex they must enter to contain a fire. Alerting them to the potential they may come in contact with danger.

But it is the criminals, usually drug-dealing small-time crooks whose gangs rival one another and whose primitive social conscience use gunfire to harm others, not the owners of long guns society and the police should be concerned about. What then is the point of having a gun registry - when those who present as a danger to society have no intention of signing on to it - other than the idiocy of useless government regulation?

Which, in the final analysis, points a finger of suspicion on farmers, on hunters, on sports-shooters? The concept was an understandable one as a lash-back against the proliferation of guns, but guns are proliferating through an underground procurement network and the registry does nothing to address that reality.

Thanks to good police work in apprehending social deviants and criminals and gun dealers there has been a downturn in violent crime using such weapons; mostly street gangs proving to one another how tough they are. Often, sadly in the process, taking the lives of innocent bystanders. But the gun registry has become an ideological political football.

It's the good guys against the bad guys. There are plenty of government initiatives that waste money to little purpose. The long gun registry is one of them. But for those who support its existence, the struggle to retain it becomes a triumph of good over evil.

Demonstrating yet again how juvenile a game politics can be, to begin with.